6 Responses to Shards

Katie I love hearing you talk about reading weird shit. I also love grumpy Eastern Europeans so I will definitely be checking this one out.

Also because you mentioned Ulysses I just gotta ask–what edition are you reading that uses asterisks to break up prose styles/chapters or whatever? I don’t remember it going down like that! And that chapter on the evolution of the English language is not only the main reason I haven’t tried rereading Ulysses yet, it was also terrible airplane material.

Harry! I am SO glad you’re watching! You should become a follower. 😉 I too love novels from the the post-Communist world.

Re: Ulysses, it’s the Wordsworth classic edition that I bought for $3 from Half Price Books in Apple Valley this summer. It’s unabridged and everything so I don’t know why it would be different…The funniest thing is that I wrote this post BEFORE reading Ch 14…Yikes! I got through it now though. On to the play!

Too bad I don’t have a wordpress account so I subscribed to you on youtube like a week ago!!! (and I saw when you originally put this video up, cheeky)

As far as Ulysses goes I am just an insufferable nerd and every time I go into a new bookstore I look at what edition they have, on account of it being in the public domain and having a million different printings. I get scared when people mention it because I remember seeing a version that was all typed in Times New Roman and didn’t have breaks between the chapters, they all just flowed into each other. No one should have to read a book like that!

you make this book sound really good, i want to read it now! 🙂 i also liked your description of the scene with the picture frame and the shelling- thought it was a nice little slice to talk about. keep ’em coming!

I liked the way you contrasted the confusion that Ismet renders to the greater level of confusion in Ulysses. It gave me perspective on how much confusion there is in Shards. I liked the description of the disturbing lying that occurs in him, first small then big. I also really liked your sharing of the image of the actual frame – the friends staying still within it while shells were falling around them. Thanks for the introduction to Shards!

Thanks! I just encountered the chapter of Ulysses written to mimic the gestation of the English language, emulating various famous authors of different literary eras. YIKES. now THAT was confusion! I suppose lots of literature is about finding that balance between simplicity/complexity.